SPOKANE, Wash. — She moves around the court with a frenetic energy. You can’t help but watch her. Where Candice Wiggins is, the action is. And where the action is, she is.
There was an NCAA tournament game last week in which Wiggins poured in 44 points. It was a career high, sure, but it was also the third most anyone had scored in an NCAA women’s tournament game. After the game, she talked with her mom, Angie.
“She’s like, ‘When I watch you play, it just feels like I’m watching Alan,’ ” Candice Wiggins recalls. “Just watching you move, you’re Alan. It’s so scary.’ “
Wiggins, a talented, 5-foot-11 senior at Stanford, is one of the top players in the game. Her team is all that stands in the way of the Maryland women returning to the Final Four. Wiggins also happens to be the youngest daughter of one of the most enigmatic baseball players to pass through Baltimore.
Alan Wiggins spent seven season in the majors, the last 2 1/2 of them in an Orioles uniform. Dick Williams, his manager in San Diego, called him an MVP. Earl Weaver, his manager in Baltimore, called him the worst player he ever managed.
After three drug suspensions – the third one indefinite – Wiggins left the game in 1987 and returned to the West Coast. Just 32 years old, he died from complications related to AIDS in January 1991.
Candice was just 3 years old. The last time she saw her father was in the hospital, Christmas Eve, just two weeks before he died. She doesn’t remember much. The father she knows is mostly culled from family stories and photographs.
“When people ask, I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. It’s like talking about a stranger,” Wiggins says, “but you know, not really.”
You always wonder how a parent’s life will affect the child, what kind of influence a parent’s successes and failures might have. By all accounts, Wiggins has excelled in spite of her father’s missteps – perhaps even because of them. Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer calls Wiggins a “special human being,” “a joy to be with every day.”
Alan Wiggins’ life – from one stellar season to many wasted opportunities – serves as a constant reminder of the razor-thin line that separates athletic achievement and personal failure.
The speedy second baseman helped the Padres win the National League pennant in 1984 by scoring 106 runs and stealing a club-record 70 bases. But by the middle of the 1985 season, he’d already been suspended a second time for drugs. He left the team, checked into rehab and was traded to Baltimore in June 1985.
But he would never find the success or camaraderie he enjoyed in San Diego. In August 1987, he was involved in a fight with Jim Dwyer and even scuffled with manager Cal Ripken Sr.
“It was abysmal,” his agent, Tony Attanasio, told the Los Angeles Times shortly after Wiggins’ death. “Players would stand in an area, Alan would walk over, and guys would [disperse], and leave Alan standing alone. He’d walk over to another group, and they’d leave. When he was on the road, he was alone. When he was at home, he was alone.”
Only one Oriole – Lee Lacy – attended his funeral. Attanasio said Wiggins was “unmercifully depressed” in Baltimore. Shortly before leaving the game, Wiggins told The Washington Post: “In retrospect, I look back and can see I should have done things differently. I just didn’t know the attitude would be so different. This is a very different team. Everyone talks about how tough Dick Williams was, but damn, we had a loose clubhouse. It was a different atmosphere, and I think, a much more tolerant one.”
Candice Wiggins has heard the stories. She has spent most of her life balancing the good versus the bad. The conflicting nature of her father’s life, the gloomy nature of his death – it’s a lot for a child to reconcile.
“I think it was a little tougher when I was younger. I didn’t really understand,” she says. “It was kind of like a phase where children … still want to think of their family members in some heroic sense. I think now, I’ve just accepted the reality of the situation. It’s something I’ve accepted, something that I don’t see as a bad thing. I think there can be a positive in it. It’s a story that’s inspired my life.”
With her father’s troubles serving as a backdrop, Wiggins’ accomplishments seem that much more extraordinary. She’s a three-time All-American and a three-time Pacific-10 Player of the Year, and next week she’ll be one of the top picks in the WNBA draft.
When Wiggins came to Stanford, she dedicated her college career to her father. She thinks about it before every game, the prospects of attaching honor to the family name. Her success on the basketball court, she says, feels like a continuation of her father’s truncated career. To her, they’re one and the same.
The similarities are apparent to others, too. Whenever her mother mentions them, Wiggins lights up. “For me to carry the traits of someone I don’t really know, it makes me feel closer to that person,” she says. “Even though he’s no longer here.”
rick.maese@baltsun.com
